Greetings once again from Madame Sidler! This week I read chapters 12-17 of On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, and while there were a great many scenes of action, suspense, humor, and love, I enjoyed the footnotes most of all. (Best of all? Festival? Now I'm getting ahead of myself; that's from chapter 31.)Here are my favorite footnotes from these six chapters.
- Ships and Sharks is a yard game introduced to Skreeans by merchants from the Green Hollows. Typically, the children play the role of Ships, and the adults are the Sharks. The game begins when the Shark says to the Ships, “Gwaaaaah!” which is generally agreed to be the sound a shark would make if it weren’t a Sea Creature. The Ships then run like mad to escape the Shark. If a Ship is overcome by a Shark, the Ship is rolled in the dirt and tickled severely. This brutal simplicity is typical of games invented by the Hollowsfolk. Another popular game from the Green Hollows is called simply Trounce.
- Of the Torrboro Baimingtons, who prided themselves on having an ancestor who coined the phrase “Jouncey as a two-ton bog pie.” The Baimingtons were careful to insert the phrase into every conversation of which they were a part.
- Three Honored and Great Subjects: Word, Form, and Song. Some silly people believe that there’s a fourth Honored and Great Subject, but those mathematicians are woefully mistaken.
- Snot wax is too repulsive a thing about which to write a proper footnote.
- According to Padovan A’Mally’s The Scourge of the Hollows (Ban Rona, Green Hollows: The Iphreny Group, 3/111), “Ridgerunners are particularly fond of artful verse, though their subject matter is almost exclusively fruit. A free-thinking ridgerunner named Tizrak Rzt scandalized the ridgerunner culture when he composed a poem entitled ‘Love, Love, Love Hath No Endingness’ and famously made no mention of fruit.”
If you’ve been reading along with us, which parts did you love best? And if you’re somewhere else in the books, that’s fine! I’d love to read your favorite lines—footnotes or otherwise!Come on over to the forum! This week, we’ve been talking about our favorite books, the hope we find at the end of the Saga, the meaning of names—and Andrew's many sly sneakeries, which we shall gleefully discover together.